SPENGLER Squeegee men and suicide
bombers By Spengler
Rudolph
Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, reduced his
city's crime rate by applying pressure on petty
criminals, such as the "squeegee men", derelicts who
cleaned windshields for a tip. The police bore down on
marijuana dealers, vandals and other minor offenders
they previously ignored, in the correct supposition that
they would have information leading to more dangerous
criminals. That is the anti-terror strategy of the
Department of Homeland Security, which has criminalized
not only the terrorists, but also ideological
sympathizers of the terrorists as well. That is, the
American definition of "terrorist sympathizer" includes
not only the local mosque official who took donations
for charities associated with Hamas, but also otherwise
peaceful men who offer mere ideological justification
for jihad, including Islamic scholars of global
reputation and job offers at leading universities. It is
an unpleasant but efficient policy.
Apropos of
this, a Muslim reader, Mr Jeff Imada, asks: "It's
very likely that by hook or by crook the [George W] Bush
administration will get in the next election. So [an
attack on] Iran is a definite. But what about after
that? What is your view on what will happen in the
future, say during 2006 when the war is in preparation
and 2007 when the war is in full swing? What will happen
to all of the Muslims in the world, will they be
targeted, will we lose what little rights we have, or
will [we] be hunted down for no other reason than [that]
we are even remotely associated with a religion? This is
under no doubt going to get worse for every one. Will
al-Qaeda become a massive force of orphans and relations
of the dead? I know now that this war is definitely
against Islamic nations to usurp their resources. But
how will it affect me? I am talking about myself in
particular. Please write an article of how each
individual Muslim will suffer under the leadership of
the Americans' attack on Islam. Need to know ... I guess
everyone does."
Mr Imada's concern has some
foundation, although it seems overwrought to say that
Muslims will be hunted down for association with a
religion. American policy has changed radically since
the first days following September 11, 2001, when the
head of the American Muslim Council prayed in public
with President George W Bush, and last summer, when he
confessed to a federal charge of terror-related
activities. Rather than court Muslim opinion, Washington
has given Muslim communities an ultimatum of sorts.
Islamist terrorists hide behind a civilian
screen wherever possible, and draw occasional support
from sympathizers within governments in Muslim countries
or Islamic communities abroad. Police have charged
leaders of ostensibly mainstream Islamic organizations
in Europe and the United States with terrorist links, in
some cases with abundant evidence. Most striking, as
noted, was the recent confession of Abdurahman Alamoudi,
founder and head of the American Muslim Council, to
laundering Libyan contributions to American Muslim
organizations. When arrested, Alamoudi had contact
information for seven men whom the US Justice Department
sought as alleged terrorists. This is a man who had met
both presidents Bill Clinton and Bush, and received
accolades from the Federal Bureau of Investigation as an
exemplar of "mainstream" Islam.
Some view the
prosecution of Alamoudi and a dozen similar cases as
part of a vast conspiracy to victimize Muslims. Some
insist that the September 11 attacks were staged by
American intelligence as a provocation. We do not know
(and may never know) all of the details, but the subtle
overlap among mosques, charities and terrorist cells has
the undivided attention of US and European authorities.
To get at the terror cells, the authorities will put
pressure on the milieu in which they operate - the
equivalent of Giuliani's squeegee men. A large fraction
of Muslims overseas hope for the success of
organizations that the American (and some other)
authorities regard as terrorist, eg, Hamas. US
intelligence hopes to isolate terrorists and starve them
of support by putting pressure on their support
networks. A bitter choice has been forced on the Muslim
communities of Europe and the United States, namely, to
cooperate with anti-terror investigations of prominent
citizens among them or to fall under general suspicion.
For individual Muslims residing in the West, this may
become rather unpleasant.
Recent actions by
American law enforcement may have as their goal
polarizing the Muslim community overseas. Diverting a
London-New York flight last week to a remote airport in
order to detain the former Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islam,
seemed like a signal of "zero tolerance" on the part of
the US authorities.
Of greater portent was the
Department of Homeland Security's action last summer
against a prominent Islamic scholar. It revoked the visa
of Tariq Ramadan, preventing him from accepting the
Henry Luce Professorship of Religion at Notre Dame
University. In April, Time Magazine named him one of the
era's 100 most important innovators, attempting to
"bridge Islamic values and Western culture". Ramadan, a
grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood,
sought to straddle the frontier between moral support
for radical Islam and dialogue with the West.
Western liberal opinion for the most part rose
up in protest, although some left-leaning sources
supported the exclusion of Ramadan. In the American
Prospect, Lee Smith wrote: "That Ramadan believes Islam
will replace Judaism and Christianity may come as a
surprise to those who thought he was just saying Islam
is compatible with liberal values (it will certainly
surprise the fathers at Notre Dame). Rather, Ramadan is
a cold-blooded Islamist who believes that Islam is the
cure for the malaise wrought by liberal values. His
revision of the jihadist paradigm - peaceful but total -
is brilliant in its way, and he may well turn out to be
a major Islamist intellectual, far surpassing even his
grandfather's influence. His cry of death to the West is
a quieter and gentler jihad, but it's still jihad.
There's no reason for Western liberals to try to
understand that point of view."
In the American
view, a porous membrane divides ideologues who
rationalize terrorist activities from the operational
cells that carry them out. Squeezing the soft outer
shell of the network, the US authorities believe, will
lead the inquisitors to the hard core. Some insights
about this line of thinking may be found in the current
academic literature on social network analysis. Useful
links can be found on the website of Valdis Krebs, for which I am
grateful to Wretchard (http://belmontclub.blogspot.com).
From the examples provided by Krebs, it does not take
much imagination to work out what has been fed into the
computers at the Department of Homeland Security, or
what they have spit back out.
Yes, Mr Imada,
individual Muslims will suffer; life will become less
pleasant for Muslim intellectuals who flirted with
radical Islam. Either you are with us, or you are
against us, Bush warned the governments of the world in
the aftermath of September 11; now the same message has
gone out to Muslim communities of the West.
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